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Help with Backing Up One External USB Drive to a Second External USB Drive

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My backup drive is a Seagate 1TB external USB drive, it has four disc image .tib files on it totaling 560GB. I've been trying unsuccessfully to make a safety copy of it on a second identical Seagate 1TB external USB drive.

At first I was trying to do a full disk image backup of the first drive to the second, but then realized that probably wouldn't work anyway since they're both the same size. So then I tried doing a file backup from the first drive to the second, thinking that was the correct approach, but again to no avail.

In all cases, the backups we're saying upwards of 20 hours to complete (which would have been ok, since subsequent incremental backups would have been quicker), but after 3 or 4 hours of running, they failed, throwing all kinds of different error messages, "media may be bad" "unable to write image" and various others, they seemed quite random... also there were "Windows delayed write failed" error messages.

This was on an old Dell Dimension 8200 with XP, and also the USB 2 ports were on an added PCI card. I tried this first with True Image 8.0, then also with True Image Echo workstation on the same machine.

Any thoughts on what the problem could be?

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If the only files you have on the 1st 1TB drive are the backup image files, you could just use Windows to copy the files to the 2nd 1TB drive. You do not need to "backup" the files to a new backup image on the 2nd 1TB drive. Be sure and validate the copies of the backup image files on the 2nd 1TB drive in case there was any error during the copy operation. This will be a very slow operation since your are copying data from one USB2 drive to another USB drive. If there are errors during the copy and if you have any additional USB ports on the system, connect one of the drives to it and leave the other USB drive connected to your PCI card USB port. Sometimes PCI USB cards can not handle large data transfers well.